I remember working in my parents video store in the eighties and renting this movie out to people.

Thank you for this, I am going to stop by the dollar store today and buy a spatula and wrap it up and give it to my wife and she is going to have no idea why, but I'm going to thoroughly enjoy the moment.

Back in 1996 a friend of mine worked for an insurance company in Manchester U.K and the IRA detonated a massive bomb in the city centre which caused huge damage and injured over 200 people

Their building wasnt too badly damaged but lost all of its windows and a lot of paperwork was literally blown out into the street. They were out of the office for a few days while they made it safe.

When they finally got back in he got yelled at by someone from the London office for not meeting some deadline. He explained about the bomb and lost paperwork to which the London asshole replied 'Well that's no excuse'.

I worked in a restaurant surrounded by high rise apartment buildings full of rich retirees. We were filled everyday at 5PM with very old people. We would play what we called “geriatric bingo” for a free dinner, i.e. I need a walker, a walker with tennis balls, and one oxygen tank, and I’ll finish this row on my sheet.

Anyway, one evening, a gentleman was having a heart attack, and the paramedics showed up, and were working on him in the aisle next to his table. A woman about ten years older than him, sitting at the next table, called me over to ask if they were going to be much longer as they were disturbing her meal.

I almost downvoted your comment after reading that. I’ve only been in the industry for 5 years and I’m bitter towards certain people I can tell would bitch about nothing. Customer service really needs some reforming if possible.

Don't forget about the shooting at one of the UPS sorting facilities, and the wildfires. I remember their Facebook page being a landmine of shit when that happened. Douches making ridiculous posts yelling at UPS, and the rest if the internet commenting on them putting said douches in their place.

I work in one of the smaller hubs, and the number of people who can't seem to follow simple instructions is staggering. We have designated areas for the following: packages for other carriers, like USPS, FedEx, and Amazon; packages with no shipping labels, mostly from people who tape their return forms to the box; and packages that violate some form of Hazmat shipping rules, like when people cross out hazardous materials diamonds and think that means they can ship whatever hazardous good they want.

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People seem to think that shipping is some magic system where you put your "to" and "from" on the box, and it just gets there, regardless of anything else.

Ugh. I do freight now. And yeah the hazmat stuff drives me insane. I'm one of two people certified in my office so it almost always ends up on my desk.

We had 10 pallets of lithium ion batteries recently none of which were labelled correctly or declared correctly.
Then the shipper got mad at us for delaying the cargo and the costs involved in fixing it.

Co worker of mine was asked if we could just declare the shippers goods as a different haz class so it could go passenger instead of cargo plane to make it cheaper!

These people just don't understand the dangers they're playing with.

Not to mention the 'I want it flown tomorrow but I don't want to pay extra also I have no commercial documents ready and the cargo is still being packed' ><

I used to work for a major cable provider in the U.S. as a call center repair agent for cable service. That role also functions as the default queue, so if you just press 0 or you otherwise fuck up the automated call routing system, you get cable repair.

Every hurricane, without fail, we get calls bitching about their service being down. IT'S A GODDAMN FUCKING HURRICANE. "but all we got was a bit of rain and wind" YEAH NO SHIT. So then I had to explain to angry entitled twats that cable service operates like a network, and taking out one part can take out other parts, too.

One of the other cable repair call centers was in the path of one of those hurricanes, so our colleagues were displaced and we were taking on their workload on top of our own. As a result, the call queue was pretty backed up. This meant hold times of 20-30m. Frustrating for everyone, but we were just happy none of our colleagues got killed; There but for the grace of god, yknow? Try explaining that to bitter old people who need their soap reruns to live.

I think yeah. People really do expect postal workers to go out and risk their lives to get stuff delivered by any means possible....

We had a few life saving parcels that made our company news site where employees went way above and beyond to find them after something happened (I think one of them was after a fire at a major hub in Europe and the hub had some medication or something that was being overnight expressed.) but that's totally different to your new slow cooker or whatever!

Dude. I can relate. I worked in travel for 6 years and it was astounding how many people would demand a flight out of an airport that was closed for blizzard, hurricane, or flood. I literally had one asshat tell me that I was terrible at my job because a guy next to him who booked a flight through another travel agent was able to get him a flight....OUT OF AN AIRPORT COMPLETELY SHUTDOWN FOR A BLIZZARD. I swear, people can be garbage.

This shit right here. I work for a very small company doing both shipping and customer service. The number of grumpy phone calls I get kills me. I’m sorry you placed your order online after our mail got picked up on a Friday before a three day weekend. No I won’t upgrade you to next day shipping for free so you can have it by Wednesday. You bought $18 worth of notebooks and it would cost us $50+ to next day that. Amazon has ruined people.

I refuse to order from Amazon. They treat their employees like dogshit. I will find what I want on Amazon, then order it from a smaller, specialty store. It costs a bit more, but my conscience is clean.

honestly unless you are a prime member their shipping sucks ass now. if I order from Bestbuy.com or HomeDepot.com or Costco I get my order shipped and delivered within the week. Now with Amazon it takes them a week for them to even ship it and few more days for it to be delivered.

If I can't get it on Amazon it may as well not exist. Electronics, clothes, groceries (via Amazon Fresh) showing up on my doorstep a day or two after I click BUY is all infinitely easier than going to a B&M store.

liquor stores though? yeah, I like liquor stores so I still go to those...

As a guy who works for Amazon, delivering specifically, they treat us pretty well. As for the shipping issues, I've never had to wait more than 3 days for something, usually a day or two. Do things happen? Yes all the time. But measured against the volume of orders we do daily, it's quite impressive they have as little as they do.

My business has spent almost $40k in the last twelve months with Amazon. They are simply too convenient. They have replaced office supply, janitorial supply, maintenance supply and inventory to a small degree. Even as a capitalist, I'm pretty repulsed by their labor tactics, but I also realize that working for them is a choice. I have several ex-Amazon guys working for me and they all get similar pay scale with a fraction of the stress and production demand.

The problem is Amazon takes a straight up loss on a lot of that stuff in order to dominate the market and aggressively acquire and muscle out competitions. It’s anti-competitive and should be regulated.

Same here. We once had to deal with a customer who was angry that he bought something on a Sunday (when we're closed) with 2-day shipping and he wasn't going to get it until that Wednesday. We tried explaining that it would ship Monday and he would get it 2 days later, but he tried arguing that since he ordered it Sunday he should get it sooner. I will never understand that thought process.

I work the customs desk for a trucking company. I seal all the time with companies/people that do not realize that there are certain things that are needed to move something into another country (at minimum, an invoice with a valid value, some country of origin information, and a Customs Broker that they have a valid account for that handles setting up the freight clearances moving in the appropriate direction), and then wonder what the delay is when they do not provide that information.

Yea, the only way I am seeing that happening is if you are in a call centre for a company that has a large warehouse in Mexico that has that much product on hand, and even then it would probably be a Monday delivery.

A lot of people do not realize just how big the US and Canada are, particularly when dealing with road shipments. If you are going to western Canada from Toronto, unless you want to deal with the hassle of moving the freight through the US, it takes almost a full day of driving (20 hours) just to get out of Ontario.

Then you deal with things like time zones and the holidays/work schedules not matching.

I deal with US/Canada shipments. Had an email I yesterday about a shipment that is delivering out on Newfoundland. We dug out the information, and found that it was on a truck waiting for a Ferry ride to the island. ETA, assuming that nothing delays the boat, is Tuesday. Customer asked about getting it delivered on Monday, and we had to explain that it was a holiday in Canada.

Still better than a few years ago when we had a customer that wanted us to deliver something at Rideau Centre on July 1st. That is Canada day, and that mall is quite literally a stones throw from Parliament Hill, the site of the biggest party in the country. We had to explain that even is there was someone there to receive it, nothing with more than 2 wheels is getting that close to Parliament Hill. It would be like delivering something to the Smithsonian on July 4th.

I ordered an air conditioner from Best Buy a few years ago for my Mom with a similar result.

There is a Best Buy about 3Km from me. I don't drive, and since it was going to my Mom's I figured ordering online and sending it to her made the most sense.

Anyway, Best Buy shipped it quickly but Purolator had other plans.

By using the tracking info, I watched the package travel from one end of their warehouse to the other and then back daily for nearly 2 weeks. Then I got some notifications saying failed delivery even though it never left their warehouse and no one ever came to deliver anything.

Then I get an email saying that I now needed to come pick up the package. It was in a warehouse about 40Km away. Ugh. Well, I ended up cancelling that order and went with my Cousin to pick one up at the store a few Km away, which I just should have done in the first place.

So yeah. 2 or 3 day shipping turned into about 3 weeks before being cancelled altogether. Good times.

I only got it shipped because it was a massively on sale high powered portable unit and I didn't want to deal with trying to transport the 100lb thing in a 2 door Honda Civic. I was already going to have to get it up a flight of stairs.

After the first failed delivery I asked them if I could just pick it up in store because it was fucking hot and I just wanted A/C. They could ship it to a store, but it would take the same amount of time as shipping it to me. Fuck that.

I asked if they had anything similar I could pick up in store for the same (massively discounted) price. Also no. Asked them to just ship it to me. Again. Which was when it was "delayed" at that fucking warehouse for almost 3 weeks. They wouldn't let me go get it myself.

All in all a $450 unit, on sale for $300, was supposed to arrive in 10 days. In actuality, it took 30 and ended up costing $100 (they did a partial refund; fuck your "online only" store credit ass bullshit).

I also work for a small company and handle shipping. I've had someone ask why we charge extra for shipping and that they wouldnt have to pay that if they bought it on amazon. Well, they're correct, they could've just bought it from us on amazon and not paid shipping but fine, complain anyway.

I avoid Amazon, but it's tough. They didn't get big because they suck, after all.

First, I try to buy locally. Great solution, right? Unfortunately, it's really hard to buy some products in a store. Many common items simply aren't available any more. More than once in the past week, I've seen someone with something I needed, and I asked "Where can you buy X?", and they just shrugged and said "Amazon". Or there's only a specialty store that sells a fancy $200 version, and I'm willing to pay a little extra for it to help the workers, but $175 of that is going to some rich fashion designer. Or the stores are only open 9-5, so I literally cannot get myself there (I work, too!) to buy the stupid thing. I tried to buy something at a new small business recently, and they didn't take cash. Hey buddy, I tried. Most stores are delighted to see cash. I'm not going to lose any sleep if you go out of business next month.

Next best, I'll buy from a non-Amazon online store. Problem solved, right? Except they all suck. Like, really really suck. Even with some household-name online stores, they product descriptions are often simply false. Maybe they don't have reviews, so there's no way for other people to report that the product descriptions are wrong. Maybe their search feature sucks, so while they might have the product you need, it's buried in 10,000 other pieces of junk so you can't find it. Maybe they have photographs of the product, and the different "angles" are actually completely different products, so you have no clue what you're getting. I've even seen cart checkouts that simply don't work -- I'm not able to complete buying anything, and I go to their own help pages, and it says what to do, and the button in their little screenshot doesn't exist in real life. Argggh.

I hate everybody. If you want to compete with Amazon, then you have to be good. No ... no, that's too much to ask. You just have to be not awful. You can be half as good as Amazon, and I will still buy from you. The problem is that other stores are not even half as good as Amazon. Stop sucking, and you will get my business. That's all it is.

I worked at UPS call center about 10 years ago when a new Iphone had just come out. East coast was hit with a horrible storm, and lots of NYC (I'm 99% sure it was NYC) had feet of water. You would not believe the ridiculous shit people were saying. "Well I fucking hope the driver can swim then!", "The rain is NOT my problem". We also had more than a few people saying things like "I had guaranteed delivery at 8AM, it is now 8 FUCKING 08!". One lady said something along the lines of "I don't care if he DROWNS getting to my door, as long as he hands me my phone before he does!".

Long ago I worked in a call center. The fire alarms went off and we had to evacuate. We had a specific thing to tell the customer in these situations. This fucking guy that I was helping with something super minor kept interrupting me and demanding that I stay until his issue was resolved despite there being no way he couldn’t hear the incredibly loud alarm or the people yelling and carrying on in the background. I ended up cutting him off to explain that there was a fire before I put down the phone and got out.

The incident was minor and in another building so we were cleared to go back in within about an hour or so. That dude, I shit you not, sat there on that phone for over an hour listening to the alarm sounds and just waiting. I came back to my desk and I could hear him yelling “HELLO”. Lmao. Then he proceeded to complain endlessly about how inconvenienced he was by my rude and abrupt departure. He ended up wasting my supervisors time for about another 30 minutes to rant about how unprofessional we were until he finally shut up long enough for someone to help him.

To put this into perspective, because I want to stress that this guy deserves no sympathy, we didn’t really have long hold times or anything. If he’d just shut his entitled hole for a minute I could have transferred him to another office. Or, he could have hung up, called back, and got another person from a different office within minutes.

I worked in a shipping warehouse within site of the twin towers. This happened to me constantly in the days following 9/11. People were demanding to know where their air freight was. “All the planes are grounded sir.”

I had a shipment tracked at a place I used to work at. I forget what the delay “code” was when I tracked it online, but I called my rep and asked if he could tell me more info so I could tell my boss what the reason the part didn’t come in on time. My rep said it was a truck fire, and that it happens more than people realize. That’s a delay I can deal with.

Damn it, Michael! This is why we don’t like upstairs workers in the warehouse. We don’t want you driving the forklift, we don’t want you playing with the baler, and we don’t want you crashing your F16s into the building.